Monthly Archives: February, 2017

Ollie had a rough weekend, apparently, like most of us last weekend, and decided to leave her enclosure at the Washington Zoo, which she shared with two male bobcats. The full headline of the article in The New York Times was “Ollie, a Standoffish Bobcat, is Missing From the National Zoo.” The Times was merely quoting the Zoo’s “curator of great cats” (why, I wonder, has my library school never posted a position quite that cool-sounding on the school listserv?), who described her in rather lengthy and judgmental detail, adding that she was “not super friendly,” and that “it would be extremely easy on us if she were a cat who would come when called, but that’s not who this individual is.”

I puzzled that the curator of great cats was so perturbed by her aloofness. Is he not the curator of great cats? Has he met a cat? Does he taxonomize them by friendliness, rather than species? Are Ollie’s two enclosure-mates models of affability? The curator of great cats added crankily, “We’re looking for a cat who could literally be sitting in a tree right next to us,” as if elusiveness and tree-climbing were traits peculiar to “this individual.” (And who refers to a cat as an “individual”? Back in my youth, “individual” and “this person” were ways in which my gay friends would seek my romantic advice without outing themselves: “This individual is very possessive, so I don’t want to upset this person.”)

On the #Ollie the Bobcat Twitter feed (because of course), one individual tweeted: “Ollie has been criticized as “very standoffish” and “not super friendly.” Because I guess there’s no right way to be a female BOBCAT either.”

And then Ollie returned. Or perhaps she never left. (She could have literally been sitting in a tree right next to us.) She was spotted near the birdcage by a keen-eyed tourist and returned to her enclosure, after receiving two stitches in her left paw and a round of booster shots.

Her escapades generated twelve pages of news headlines on Google. Ollie stories were reported in France and the U.K., and her return provoked a number of think pieces in which she was used as a great symbol of whatever the writer had in mind.

“She was every American worker, underappreciated, shunted to the side,” wrote Petula Dvorak in The Washington Post. “The bobcat habitat wasn’t even on the zoo’s main circle around Big Cat mountain, just a little culvert, no more glamorous than the accounts payable or customer service department.”